Tim White

Don’t hit the SNOOZE Button

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Tim

If you’re someone who hits the snooze button when your alarm goes off every morning, trying to eke out just a few more minutes of sleep, it’s time to end the habit. The Week cites an essay in Pacific Standard that says of the snooze button: “Not only do we delay the start of our days, but we compromise the very sleep we are trying to steal. . . . When we hear the first sound of the alarm, our bodies release adrenaline and cortisol, hormones that wake us, interrupting our natural sleep cycle to make us alert.

Surrendering to the temptation of the snooze erases that hormonal surge: Our bodies try to reenter the deeper periods of sleep. Only those restorative levels of sleep take a lot longer than nine minutes to enter, so every snooze confuses our bodies even more.” The essay argues, in fact, that “snooze sleep” is worse than not getting any extra sleep because it throws off your circadian rhythms and you’ll actually feel groggier than if you’d just gotten up naturally.